This tenth edition of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators is a good time to take stock of progress over the last decade. When the Index was launched, there were few efforts to develop environmental indicators or report trends in a useful way for the media or the public. Now there are dozens of worthy efforts in the public and private sector, many of them highly detailed and most available on the Internet. (An inventory of 86 Internet-accessible indicator sets is included in this edition.) As often as not, these efforts reveal how much we don’t know about environmental conditions and trends, and point to the need to fill in the large gaps in our understanding.

The Index is intended to be expository rather than compendious, so that it can stay within a readable length. It remains at heart a yearbook, featuring a combination of core indicators along with wide-ranging and often provocative analysis of current issues by the principal author, Steven Hayward, and other contributing writers.

There are thousands of environmental indicators that might be used, from the global scale down to the local neighborhood. The Index limits itself to core indicators on the national level for air quality, water quality, toxic chemicals in the environment, and land use. And it distills research and data that are buried in cumbersome government databases or unwieldy reports—data often inaccurately reported, if at all, in the media.

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